Bug Description

Binary package hint: ekiga

When using pulseaudio as soundserver, ekiga hangs when calling someone.

Steps to reproduce:

1) The audio wizard works with the pulseaudio settings (alsa emulation, default device)
2) Call someone
3) When the other side answeres the phone, ekiga hangs (does not respond any more)
4) Retry with normal alsa: everything works

However, some ALSA apps, such as aplay, alsa-mixer, mplayer with "-ao alsa", and exaile work just fine with the "pulse" pcm and control plugins. OTOH, several SDL apps skip and even crash the PulseAudio server when using the alsa pulse plugin. The same SDL apps work much better when using the SDL esd or pulse plugins to connect to the same server.

So, I suspect the bug lies in the PulseAudio server and/or the pulse alsa plugin. It seems the server must be at least partly to blame, since some client connections (mostly from the alsa plugin) crash it.

I'm no longer so certain there's a bug in the PulseAudio server. Some ALSA clients (such as SDL) cause pulseaudio to use all available CPU time until it writes "Soft CPU time limit exhausted, terminating." to its stdout and exits. I'm not sure exactly where that message comes from or what causes pulseaudio to exit. It may be the kernel forcibly killing the process, so this may be more a configuration issue than a bug in pulseaudio.

the only way i have been able to get ekiga to work (echo test) is to kill pulseaudio before starting it. "pasuspender -- ekiga" doesnt do the trick. other gnome apps work fine like sound-recorder/banshee/flash/etc.

I can confirm similar problems. After upgrading to 9.10 ekiga-sound stopped working on all our (8) computers. 100% CPU last. Video is working. You can hear about 1 second distorted sound, then no sound at all.

Can confirm this bug on three different boxes. Ekiga doesn't work on Karmic using pulse. This essentially leaves Ubuntu without a SIP-capable phone application. Empathy doesn't count as it's SIP support is close to non-existent (can't connect to sipgate for example, fails to place calls repeatedly). I think this situation needs a fix asap.

I'm also having this problem. I can't call anyone due to bug #332543, but I get the same problem when I try to test the sound events in the sound events preferences: ekiga uses 100% cpu. The UI is still responsive, but when I try to quit ekiga that doesn't work until I kill it manually.
Same problem when run under pasuspender.
If I kill pulseaudio first, playing the test sounds works more or less, though there is still sometimes crackling while playing a test sound.
Skype and other audio work fine.

When I call the echo test, I get video but no audio at all. The volume change icon below the video stays greyed out.

When I try to play a test sound (in the sound events preferences section) through the default device with pulseaudio enabled, that works fine the first time. When I repeatedly play a sound, it works fine for the first 10 seconds or so, after that it starts crackling. If I continue playing the test sound, the crackling stays for another 2 to 20 seconds, and then sound stops and ekiga hangs at 100% cpu. The UI also becomes unresponsive and I have to kill it. Banshee is having no trouble playing music at the same time, so PulseAudio is not having any problems.

When I try to play a test sound through the "HDA Intel (PTLIB/ALSA)" device with pulseaudio suspended or pulseaudio enabled but not actually playing anything at that moment, I get sound but it is as if every 50 ms sample gets repeated for 5 seconds before ekiga decides to play the next 50 ms part. Ekiga still advances through the sound file, but veeeeerrrrryyyy slowly and stuttery.
This behaviour is the same I had with PulseAudio under Jaunty when I tried to play any kind of sound after my laptop resumed from a suspend. Killing PA every time I resumed was a workaround there. In Karmic this PA problem was fixed.